e3 1220v3 versus c2550

[wibwabwob]

Hi
I plan to build my own home server.
It will get 5x3TB Raid Z1 ZFS and it shall be capable to run a music streamer and video service (something like Serviio) (so some encoding is required from time to time). Furthermore I want to be able to handle 1gbit/s traffic (LAN Parties )

I'm unsure about the cpu:
There's the Supermicro Mainboard A1SAM-2550F with a 4 core atom c2550 and on the other hand i planned with a Supermicro X10SAE and an e3 1220v3.

My questions:
- is a c2550 powerful enough?

- does an i3 need more power for the same work compared to an c2550? Or does an i3 always needs more energy like if I would drive a car with high cylinder capacity.

- How much RAM do you recommend?

- Do you think the inbuilt sata controller of the boards is fine? or should i get a seperate one?

Regards
wibwabwob

 

[martinmsj]

The Xeon E3 is not even in the same ballpark. It's much more powerful than the quad core atom. Not sure why power would come into play though. Are you concerned about heat?

Also, as far as the sata controll;ers are concerned it depends on what NAS set up you're going for. For example, some FreeNAS setups demand quite a bit of CPU power. Don't quote me on this though, but I do believe for FreeNAS, a software solution is required for some advanced features and preferred so as to give FreeNAS full control over every stage of operation. (Sounds like you're going for some type of FreeNAS setup.)

Back to the CPU, I think you're going deep into it incorrectly. The way CPU's work is that the faster a CPU completes the task, the faster it can go to idle. Power draw on the other hand, I'm still not sure why you are concerned with CPU power draw.

 

[devman]

Just an FYI the next step up in the Xeon E3 series (E3-1230v3) has hyperthreading support and I don't think it costs that much extra.

 

[iroc409]

FreeNAS has had a few threads with Avoton builds, but I think most of them are the 8-core versions. You might look those over, I thought I've read they have had issues saturating gigabit networks with the chip.

Performance wise, Avaton is a huge step for the Atom, and they would make good home virtual machines.

 

[devman]

FreeNAS has had a few threads with Avoton builds, but I think most of them are the 8-core versions. You might look those over, I thought I've read they have had issues saturating gigabit networks with the chip.

Performance wise, Avaton is a huge step for the Atom, and they would make good home virtual machines.

Funny this comes up here, I was just reading about this over at the pfsense boards (I'm currently mulling over a DIY router).

Apparently they have benched the C2358 (thats 1.7GHz dual-core at 7W TDP version) routing at between 900 Mbps and 940 Mbps without CPU saturation. I'm not sure if those figures are with pf running or just wide open, though.

I'm still researching it but needless to say, the c2000 series Atom processors have got my attention

 

[iroc409]

Most routers don't need much--unless you're talking business networks. The dual-core 500Mhz MIPS CPU in the EdgeRouter Lite is apparently capable of forwarding 1MM PPS with a total system power of no more than 7W, and the Avoton's are *vastly* faster than that. They'll run fairly fast with a complex firewall rule set. I don't know how fast, but should be good for at least 150Mbit with FreeBSD and PF running on them (which doesn't make use of their proprietary hardware offloading systems).

Apparently, the new J1900's and even maybe the Avoton's are not particularly recommended for UTM duty due to a lack in performance, but they would probably work for home use.

That said, network routing/firewalling and ZFS NAS duty are two different critters. I do like where the new Intel CPUs are heading, and Avoton is a good step forward.

 

[Aesma]

The Xeon E3 is not even in the same ballpark. It's much more powerful than the quad core atom. Not sure why power would come into play though. Are you concerned about heat?

Also, as far as the sata controll;ers are concerned it depends on what NAS set up you're going for. For example, some FreeNAS setups demand quite a bit of CPU power. Don't quote me on this though, but I do believe for FreeNAS, a software solution is required for some advanced features and preferred so as to give FreeNAS full control over every stage of operation. (Sounds like you're going for some type of FreeNAS setup.)

Back to the CPU, I think you're going deep into it incorrectly. The way CPU's work is that the faster a CPU completes the task, the faster it can go to idle. Power draw on the other hand, I'm still not sure why you are concerned with CPU power draw.

Many people have entered the 21st century (or just don't have access to cheap electricity) and thus put power frugality high on their list, especially for a machine that will stay online all the time.

Aside from that I'll comment on ZFS, RAIDZ1 for 3TB drives is a bit risky, unless you have good backups and don't mind a fatal double failure. Also "saturating 1GBps" will be easy for a sequential load, however if at your LAN party 10 people want to download at the same time, IOPS will matter and IOPS might be low with that setup (just like with RAID5).

 

[omniscence]

Most of the power budget is made up by auxillary components on the mainboards.
Avoton Atoms and Haswell Xeons consume almost nothing while idle.
The controller IC on LSI controllers for example has a much higher idle consumption than the mentioned CPUs.

 

[wibwabwob]

Hi,
thank you very much for your helping answers

@devman: I chose the one without HT because HT is not of any use for ZFS. It is recommended to disable it when using ZFS.

Regarding your answers I have some questions left:
1.) What else than RAID 5 / RAID Z1 would you recommend regarding better IOPS.
Would a cache help me to reduce iop issue? (l2arc and so on, on zfs)

2.) Are there somewhere power consumption values depending on cpu usage?

3.) When I understand you in the right way, then basically an i3 doesn't consume more power when in idle than the atom?
It only consumes more if it calculates "faster" than the atom, while the atom may need more time to do the same calculation. Thus they will use the same energy in total?


Why I'm concerned about power:
power consumption is money and it's not too cheap here (25-30 Eurocents / kWh)
and I don't want to waste power if it's not necessary.


Regards
wibwabwob

 

[kirbyrj]

Here's the way I look at it:
If you're going to encode, you'll want a more powerful processor. If the processor isn't in use, it will idle down to hardly any power draw. It would be different if you're using it 100% load 24/7/365, but realistically you're not. So personally, I'd get the Xeon.

 

[martinmsj]

Many people have entered the 21st century (or just don't have access to cheap electricity) and thus put power frugality high on their list, especially for a machine that will stay online all the time.

Yes, I understand the concern if the machine is running all the time with the cpu @ 100%. The Xeons will consume more. However, this doesn't seem like it would be the case. The better performing processors in his work loads (as far as I can tell) will perform faster and then go to idle faster. In the end, you're not saving much power (if at all) if the Xeons finish quicker and thus goes idle quicker while the other CPU's are still "on the job."

A good example is the 2011 MBPs (13) with the 2.7 GHz i7 & 2.2 GHz i5. The i7 model had longer battery life simply because they could finish task quicker and go idle quicker. In fact, this was also the case against E5-L Xeon models. They were lower power CPUS but they didn't save money/power in the end when the faster E5's could finish the tasks and move to the next task much faster.

Though, if he is using FreeNAS, depending on his setup, I believe the Xeon is recommended.

I just think that this isn't quite clear as it is without testing. And I also have to remind myself that I gave up on the "home built" FreeNAS stuff a couple of years ago so things may have changed in that regard.

 

[clownshoes]

As a few others have mentioned, I wouldn't worry about power consumption too much when making your decision. The Xeon will be idle most of the time and when idle it consumes next to nothing.

It really depends on what you want to do though. I'd probably go with the Xeon though for future proofing and there is a lot of cool stuff you can do with ZFS and FreeNAS that requires some power.

Either way, I'd recommend 16GB of ram and make sure you use ECC.

Also, I wouldn't use raidz1 period. It simply isn't reliable with the larger drives today. I'd strongly recommend you pick up 1 additional drive and go with a 6 drive raidz2 config.

 

[Aesma]

You're comparing CPUs but in reality a Xeon is usually on a full ATX board with plenty of power hungry things on it, while the Atom is on a mini-ITX board with everything geared towards low power usage. There is a reason why these Atom boards exist and sell.

 

[kirbyrj]

You're comparing CPUs but in reality a Xeon is usually on a full ATX board with plenty of power hungry things on it, while the Atom is on a mini-ITX board with everything geared towards low power usage. There is a reason why these Atom boards exist and sell.

Such as? Last time I checked server boards are going to have similar sets of additional ICC's including NIC's, SATA controllers, etc. So the only thing that can possibly draw more power is a NB, and a C226 northbridge is pretty low power.